The blaze from the trees spreads to tablecloths and crepe paper - a chain reaction so brilliantly spectacular and terrible, I ache to be a part of it...to devour and destroy,then relish in the plunder. I could do it.I could stand here amid the flames...
Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are the hardest to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip y...
At the advent of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the human heart: one very reasonably invites a man to consider the nature of the peril and the means of escaping it; the other, with a still greater show of reason, ar...
The Mozart sonata Dad picked out begins to play. When we hear the first note, we open the sacks and the ladybugs escape through the opening, taking flight. It's as if someone has dumped rubies from heaven. Soon they will land on the plants in search ...
He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the ...
They were readers for whom literature was a drug, each complex plot line delivering a new high, suspending them above reality, allowing them a magical crossover...They had spoken often, with rueful honesty, of how the books they read represented esca...
I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to c...
It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore it...
The problem with working, I mean not self-employed, is that you have to get up and routinely do something that you do not want to do, plus you get talked down to, ordered around by twats, you know you are better than. In reality, you are no better th...
One night I dreamed of an angel: I walked into a huge, empty bar and saw him sitting in a corner with his elbows on the table and a cup of milky coffee in front of him. She’s the love of your life, he said, looking up at me, and the force of his ga...
I think it was a sense of being completely swallowed up by nature that gave the prairie its powerful attraction.There is nothing like it in all of Europe. Even high up on a Swiss glacier one is still conscious of the toy villages below, the carefully...
The world can accommodate your situation, as it accommodates all situations. And your body will keep explaining to you how it all works, this original experiment, this lifelong gift. Your body will keep describing how, for the first time being at lea...
The writer doesn’t want to disclose or instruct or advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery, he cares for it like a fugitive in his cabin, his cave. He doesn’t want to talk it into giving itself up. He would never tur...
I have been asked what I mean by “word of honor.” I will tell you. Place me behind prison walls—walls of stone ever so high, ever so thick, reaching ever so far into the ground—there is a possibility that in some way or another I might be abl...
Fairy tales in childhood are stepping stones throughout life, leading the way through trouble and trial. The value of fairy tales lies not in a brief literary escape from reality, but in the gift of hope that goodness truly is more powerful than evil...
If the soul is immortal, it demands our care not only for that part of time which we call life, but for all time: and indeed it would seem now that it will be extremely dangerous to neglect it. If death were a release from everything, it would be a b...
I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way...
Don’t live life as a spectator. Always examine life: Espouse new ideas, long for new things, constantly discovering new interests, escaping from boring routines. Engage life with enthusiasm; grasping life aggressively and squeezing from it every dr...
There was a knock on the bedroom door. “Matt?” Fuck. “Nope. Silence. “Would you be the owner of the leather pants?” “Yep.” She paused briefly. “I’m going to pass these through the door. You have exactly thirty seconds to pull them o...
Whenever it shows itself - hope, that is - hands from the crowded streets reach for it with such violent urgency because of the fear that they may never see it again. They do so without knowing that their desperation frightens hope away. Hope also do...
Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify and direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle r...
